"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 5 - Icefalcons Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never
mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis' jeweled weapon, either.
How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer
had up his fur-lined sleeves? But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down
her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. "Damn," she
said.
Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy's where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up
sharply at the note in the girl's voice. "What is it?"
"I . . ." Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight
brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had
found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light.
"Damn," she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. "There're men coming
up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men-horses-spears glittering in the moonlight..."
"What?" Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae's
shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. "Where?"
"They've just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents."
She looked up into the Lady's face with baffled eyes. "It's hard to see in darkness, but I think they're
black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta islands with gold
beads in their hair. They're coming fast."
Alde cursed, something she seldom did. "Send for Janus," she said. "We need to meet them at the Tall
Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae..."
Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit
watchroom of the Guards.

The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis' camp through the night, turn and turn about with
hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostly in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way
asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of
mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World.
He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the
Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that
even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most
mud-diggers.
"It is very foolish not to know whether your horses are the sons and daughters of brave beasts or
cowards," he said gravely, stripping the skin from a woodchuck he had shot while Yellow-Eyed Dog
slaveringly feigned disinterest.
They sheltered in another bison wallow, not the one southeast of the hill but an older one to the
southwest, full of curly buffalo grass and pennyroyal, with a good view over the broken lands to the
south.
"How can you know what they will do if you don't know about their ancestors before them? These
mud-diggers of yours want all the wrong things and don't know what is important."
"They are not my mud-diggers," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And I have told them this many times."
"Then why do you follow this shaman? This child is not your kin. He may even be your enemy." He used
the word dingyeh, "notkin," oktep in the tongue of the Talking Stars, and set the strips of woodchuck
flesh over the hot coals of last night's fire to roast.
"The child is ..." The Icefalcon was silent a moment, trying to phrase his relationship to Eldor-and to the
people in the Keep-in terms that could be understood in the Real World. There was much about his new
life that he could not explain in terms of the old.
At length he said, "The child's father helped me and gave me shelter when I departed from my own
people."
"Did you need shelter?" asked Loses His Way.